Free Republic

David Rose talks to Kanan Makiya, the exile analysing three million documents to bring Baghdad's butchers to justice Like George W. Bush, the Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya - the man who first drew the world's attention to the extent of Saddam Hussein's crimes in his seminal 1989 book, Republic of Fear - was woken at 5am last Sunday by a phone call from Baghdad. Makiya was in America, where he made his home as a professor at Brandeis University during his long exile, and was staying with his family in Massachusetts when he heard Saddam had been captured. 'I jumped...

FARIS AL-KAMEL had waited more than a decade to be able to sell his collection of political books in the open. Yesterday his patience was finally rewarded as he proudly arranged his samizdat editions in the Mutanabi Street book market in Baghdad’s old city. “It was a long process to publish books like these in Iraq,” he said. “First you had to get hold of a banned edition, then photocopy it, cut it, bind it and finally design the cover. That is the bit I enjoyed most. I am rather pleased with how they turned out.” The comparisons with the...